A single bout of meditation biases cognitive control but not attentional focusing: Evidence from the global-local task.
Author: Colzato LS1, van der Wel P2, Sellaro R2, Hommel B2.
Affiliation:
1Institute for Psychological Research, Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands. Electronic address: colzato@fsw.leidenuniv.nl. 2Institute for Psychological Research, Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands.
Conference/Journal: Conscious Cogn.
Date published: 2015 Nov 27
Other:
Volume ID: 39 , Pages: 1-7 , Special Notes: doi: 10.1016/j.concog.2015.11.003 , Word Count: 148
Recent studies show that a single bout of meditation can impact information processing. We were interested to see whether this impact extends to attentional focusing and the top-down control over irrelevant information. Healthy adults underwent brief single bouts of either focused attention meditation (FAM), which is assumed to increase top-down control, or open monitoring meditation (OMM), which is assumed to weaken top-down control, before performing a global-local task. While the size of the global-precedence effect (reflecting attentional focusing) was unaffected by type of meditation, the congruency effect (indicating the failure to suppress task-irrelevant information) was considerably larger after OMM than after FAM. Our findings suggest that engaging in particular kinds of meditation creates particular cognitive-control states that bias the individual processing style toward either goal-persistence or cognitive flexibility.
Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
KEYWORDS:
Congruency effect; Focused attention meditation (FAM); Global precedence; Open monitoring meditation (OMM)
PMID: 26637968
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